Border wall between the U.S. and Mexico, in a photo from early 2008. During a period of increasing gang violence in Mexico, and flows of guns from the U..S. into Mexico, artists had decorated the wall with gun images. For decades, population centers along the border have had sections of fence or wall.Jorge Duenes / Reuters

Today’s life-in-DC gazette: a little while ago I was in a line at a coffee shop with a middle-aged man, who from his accent I guessed (correctly) was from Nigeria. We talked while we were waiting. His was a standard life-in-our times story: He came to the US about 30 years ago. Now a citizen and small-business owner. Children all born here and in, or headed to, college. One of his nephews is a TSA screener at a DC-area airport.

“His rent was due on the 5th, man,” he told me, of his nephew. “He covered that, but then he was counting on his normal paycheck tomorrow. That’s not going to come, and he’s got his credit card payments. And he has to keep showing up at work each day.” The man I was talking to said he assumed he might have to tide his nephew over through the shutdown.

We all “know” this is happening. But it can be easy to lose sight of how extraordinary and unfair it is. Not a single person within TSA—or the National Park Service, or the Food and Drug Administration, or the Census Bureau, or any other agency—has a single thing to do with the showdown over Donald Trump’s “wall.” But hundreds of thousands of them are being penalized and disrupted by what will soon be the longest shutdown in history.

It can also be easy to lose sight of three baseline realities of this abusive situation. Here’s the summary, with a few more details on each, lower down.

Reality one: As recently as three weeks ago, Donald Trump was perfectly willing to keep the government open and defer funding for his wall— until a right-wing chorus made fun of him for looking “weak.”

Reality two: Trump and his Congressional party never bestirred themselves to fund this wall back when they had unquestioned power to do so, during the era of Republican control of the Congress in 2017 and 2018.

Reality three: the U.S.-Mexico border has come under more control in recent years, not less. It’s been controlled by fences and walls in the busiest areas — as has been the practice for decades. The “crisis” is the politics of the issue, not its underlying realities.

Read on, for more details of each of the three. Or if you stop here, please keep those three points in mind.

A few more details, on facts that everyone knows but that can slip from sight in the froth of “both sides dig in” daily news updates.

Donald Trump and the Republican Senate were perfectly willing to keep the government open, until the likes of Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh began mocking them as “losers” and “sell-outs.”

You can read the specifics at the end of this piece, but the sequence is indisputable. On December 18, Mitch McConnell’s GOP-run Senate passed, on a unanimous voice vote, a “clean” funding measure, to keep the government open and postpone funding fights about “the wall.” They did so with guidance from the White House that Donald Trump would go along.

Then the right-wing mocking began; then immediate funding for the wall became an “emergency”; then Trump preferred a shutdown to appearing to “lose.” Mitch McConnell’s GOP of course switched right along with him—and against the measure all of its members had supported just days ago.

One man’s insecurity, and his party’s compliance, are disrupting millions of lives.

During the two years in which Trump and the Republicans could easily have gotten funding for the wall, they didn’t bother to try.

Through all of 2017 and 2018, Trump’s GOP held a large majority in the House, and a workable majority in the Senate. Trump and the GOP took care to ram through things they really cared about in that period, from Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the Trump tax cuts.

They didn’t bother to try for a wall. The supposed “emergency”didn’t matter when they had power to get their way. As Ezra Klein has argued, the most plausible explanation is that Trump doesn’t actually care about having a wall. He cares about being seen as fighting for it (as Ronald Brownstein has explained).

The number of illegal crossings on the U.S.-Mexico border, like the percentage of undocumented residents and workers in the U.S., has been going down, not up. That’s not the tone of political talk, but it’s what academic and government research shows. For instance, consider this recent report from Pew.

Border security is important, and for decades politicians of both parties have supported fences and walls in populated areas as obvious necessities. The photo at the top of this post, was taken near Tijuana 11 years ago. (The U.S. built the wall; Mexican graffitists provided the illustration.) When I did a big cover story for The Atlantic on immigration more than 35 years ago—yes, during Ronald Reagan’s first term, in 1983—I visited fences and walls in California, Arizona, and Texas.

Walls themselves aren’t controversial. They’re part of what Republicans and Democrats have long recommended for stable controls at the border—and they’re part of what has made immigrant flows more rather than less manageable. The wall, a fantasized Maginot-style structure stretching 2,000 miles from the Pacific to the Gulf Coast, is different. That’s what Trump is pushing for—now that he no longer has a chance to get it.

People obviously disagree on these issues. You could make a case for a much different approach to immigration than the one I might personally favor. But it’s hard to imagine a decent case for knowingly inflicting damage on hundreds of thousands of public servants, who have nothing whatsoever to do with this issue and whose only mistake was to have chosen a vulnerable line of work.

At a bakery in Washington D.C. today, a deal for furloughed government workers. Offers like this, becoming widespread across the area, obviously help. Just as obviously, they're no substitute for regular pay.Deborah Fallows

On Monday I mentioned what the prolonged government shutdown is doing to the nation’s air-travel system: namely, slowing it down.

The whole system is based on built-in safety buffers. Everyone within it knows that air traffic controllers and TSA screeners, whose jobs are stressful enough at best, have new personal worries. Therefore controllers, dispatchers, TSA supervisors, and others who keep the traffic moving are building in extra protection, mainly by giving themselves more time.

This means more separation for aircraft in what William Langewiesche called the “slam and jam” approach patterns to airports; more time for a screener to take another look at a bag; more caution about everything, since—shutdown or no—the consequences of a hasty mistake could be so grave. People running the system would be irresponsible to do anything else. (Yes, before you point it out: I realize how odd it sounds even to discuss “responsibility” in current circumstances.)

Now Jirs Meuris, of the University of Wisconsin Business School, explains why this cautious approach is even more important than it may seem. In a research paper last fall, he discussed studies showing that the more worried employees were about their personal finances, the more accident- and error-prone they were in their work.

[We collaborated] with a national transportation company to collect survey data from over 1,000 short-haul truck drivers and track their accident rates for the subsequent eight months.

Analysis of this data revealed that financial worry was associated with a higher probability of a preventable accident by decreasing drivers’ available cognitive capacity at work….

Based upon the average cost of a commercial truck accident, we estimated that financial worry was associated with $1.3 million per year in company costs due to the higher rates of preventable accidents.

And:

To replicate our findings, we subsequently moved to a laboratory setting. As part of these lab sessions, participants imagined that their car had a break down with an attached price tag of $150 or $1,500 and were asked to write about how this expense would affect their life. Afterward, they completed two cognitive tests and a driving simulation.

After being asked to imagine the consequences of a minor repair bill, or a major one, the subjects took cognitive tests and did a driving simulation. Randomly chosen subjects who were thinking about a $1,500 bill did worse than those thinking they’d have to cover $150.

How would this apply in current shutdown circumstances? Through the university, Jirs Meuris (more of his research here) put out this statement today:

Based on my research, we should be worried about the impact of the current shutdown on our national security and health as thousands of government workers including those at the FBI, DEA, FDA, Border Patrol, and TSA work to protect us from threats while going without a paycheck and living in a state of financial uncertainty.

As their financial insecurity grows, we can be sure that our own security falters along with it. We need to recognize that a shutdown over border security may actually do more harm to it than what there may be to gain from it.

Mitch McConnell could end this insanity tomorrow, by scheduling another vote on the “clean resolution” that passed the Senate on unanimous voice vote three weeks ago, and would clearly pass again now. (The nitty-gritty is discussed at the end of this post.) Donald Trump could end it by returning to his position as of December 19, which was after he’d signaled to the Congress that he would sign that resolution—but before he was scared off by mockery for this “cave in” from Ann Coulter, Steve Doocy, and Rush Limbaugh. And of course, if it really had been of such existential importance, he could worked toward it over the past two years, when his party controlled the Senate and the House.

Meanwhile, we rely on the willingness of hundreds of thousands of public employees to keep showing up for work, keep figuring out how they’ll pay their bills, and meanwhile try to give full mind-share to the next airplane on final approach, and the next bag through the X-ray machine.

Like many people who spend too much time on Twitter, I watched with indignation Saturday morning as stories began appearing about a confrontation near the Lincoln Memorial between students from Covington Catholic High School and American Indians from the Indigenous Peoples March. The story felt personal to me; I live a few miles from the high school, and my son attends a nearby all-boys Catholic high school. I texted him right away, ready with a lesson on what the students had done wrong.

“They were menacing a man much older than them,” I told him, “and chanting ‘Build the wall!’ And this smirking kid blocked his path and wouldn’t let him leave.” The short video, the subject of at least two-thirds of my Twitter feed on Saturday, made me cringe, and the smirking kid in particular got to me: His smugness, radiating from under that red MAGA hat, was everything I wanted my teenagers not to be.

Mort Felix liked to say that his name, when read as two Latin words, meant “happy death.” When he was sick with the flu, he used to jokingly remind his wife, Susan, that he wanted Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” played at his deathbed. But when his life’s end arrived at the age of 77, he lay in his study in his Berkeley, California, home, his body besieged by cancer and his consciousness cradled in morphine, uninterested in music and refusing food as he dwindled away over three weeks in 2012. “Enough,” he told Susan. “Thank you, and I love you, and enough.” When she came downstairs the next morning, she found Felix dead.

During those three weeks, Felix had talked. He was a clinical psychologist who had also spent a lifetime writing poetry, and though his end-of-life speech often didn’t make sense, it seemed to draw from his attention to language. “There’s so much so in sorrow,” he said at one point. “Let me down from here,” he said at another. “I’ve lost my modality.” To the surprise of his family members, the lifelong atheist also began hallucinating angels and complaining about the crowded room—even though no one was there.

The death of Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t a galvanizing event, but the premature end of a movement that had only just begun.

“Woe to you, because you build tombs for the prophets, and it was your ancestors who killed them.” Jesus’s rebuke to the Pharisees descended upon me on a cold January morning in 2017, in West Potomac Park in Washington, D.C. On that Monday, the national holiday dedicated to the man at whose memorial I stood, the capital bustled in anticipation of a more pressing political event. That’s why I was at the park, pondering this granite stone of hope, carved out of a mountain of despair. The memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. cast its shadow over me, its presence just as conflicted as those tombs.

As sure as Jesus’s words proved prescient about the adoption of Christianity in the empire that killed him, so too the modern-day legend of King writes itself in real time. In the official story told to children, King’s assassination is the transformational tragedy in a victorious struggle to overcome.

President Donald Trump is trapped. He shut the government to impose his will on the incoming Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. That plan has miserably failed. Instead, Trump has found himself caught in the trap he supposed he had set for his opponents.

Now he is desperately seeking an exit.

Trump attempted Exit One on January 8.He spoke that evening to the nation from the Oval Office, hoping to mobilize public opinion behind him, pressing the Democratic leadership of the House to yield to him. That hope was miserably disappointed. Surveys post-speech found that Trump had swayed only 2 percent of TV viewers. In the 10 days since the speech, Trump’s approval ratings have dipped to about the lowest point in his presidency. The supposedly solid Trump base has measurably softened.

Starting the process will rein in a president who is undermining American ideals—and bring the debate about his fitness for office into Congress, where it belongs.

On January 20, 2017,Donald Trump stood on the steps of the Capitol, raised his right hand, and solemnly swore to faithfully execute the office of president of the United States and, to the best of his ability, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. He has not kept that promise.

Instead, he has mounted a concerted challenge to the separation of powers, to the rule of law, and to the civil liberties enshrined in our founding documents. He has purposefully inflamed America’s divisions. He has set himself against the American idea, the principle that all of us—of every race, gender, and creed—are created equal.

The civil-rights leader is now celebrated as a modern founding father, a celebration that gives those who oppose his policy agenda a claim to his legacy.

Every year, on the third Monday in January, people play their hand at the same game. “What would Martin Luther King Jr. think?” becomes an unwritten essay prompt for op-eds, a topic of speeches and sermons, a call to action, and a societal rebuke. In this annual pageant, there are few who would ever mark themselves as living in opposition to the legacy of King, even as they work to dismantle it.

It was only natural that Vice President Mike Pence would quote King in defense of President Donald Trump’s decision to continue the ongoing government shutdown until he receives full funding for a border wall. “One of my favorite quotes from Dr. King was: ‘Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy’,” Pence said on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, citing King’s famous 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. “You think of how he changed America. He inspired us to change through the legislative process, to become a more perfect union. That’s exactly what President Trump is calling on Congress to do: Come to the table in the spirit of good faith.”

“We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom.”

In April 1963, King was jailed in Birmingham, Alabama, after he defied a state court’s injunction and led a march of black protesters without a permit, urging an Easter boycott of white-owned stores. A statement published in The Birmingham News, written by eight moderate white clergymen, criticized the march and other demonstrations.

This prompted King to write a lengthy response, begun in the margins of the newspaper. He smuggled it out with the help of his lawyer, and the nearly 7,000 words were transcribed. The eloquent call for “constructive, nonviolent tension” to force an end to unjust laws became a landmark document of the civil-rights movement. The letter was printed in part or in full by several publications, including the New York Post, Liberation magazine, The New Leader, and The Christian Century. The Atlantic published it in the August 1963 issue.

She beat George W. Bush on Social Security privatization, and she’ll beat Trump on the wall.

Democrats sometimes portray themselves as high-minded and naive—unwilling to play as rough as the GOP. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is, once again, proving that self-image wrong. She’s not only refusing Donald Trump’s demand for a border wall. She’s trying to cripple his presidency. And she may well succeed.

Pelosi’s strategy resembles the one she employed to debilitate another Republican president: George W. Bush. Bush returned to Washington after his 2004 reelection victory determined to partially privatize Social Security. “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital,” he told the press, “and I intend to spend it.” Bush’s plan contained two main elements. The first was convincing the public that there was a crisis. Social Security, he declared in his 2005 State of the Union address, “is headed toward bankruptcy.” The second was persuading Democrats to offer their own proposals for changing it.

[Please see Updates at the end of this post.] I don’t know who the young man in the MAGA hat in this photo is. And I don’t care to know.

His name, which the internet will inevitably turn up, really doesn’t matter. It matters to his parents, of course—and to his teachers. I hope they will be reflective, and I know they should be ashamed: of this smirking young man and the scores of other (nearly all white) students from a Catholic school in Kentucky. Today, on the National Mall in Washington, they apparently mocked, harassed, and menaced a Native American man who had fought for the United States in Vietnam and who today represented both the U.S. and his Omaha nation with poise, courage, and dignity.

Rudy Giuliani, on the Sunday shows, says the president never told Michael Cohen to lie about pursuing Trump Tower Moscow during the 2016 campaign.

Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who’s representing President Donald Trump for free, is keeping up his public-relations war on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. In a pair of appearances on Sunday-morning talk shows, he stuck to the playbook: Attack Mueller’s credibility, and insist that all of Trump’s statements and actions were legal. Giuliani admits a fair amount but always insists that no crime was committed.

The president’s attorney once again said that discussions about a Trump Tower Moscow project may have continued as late as November 2016, contrary to the president’s previous statements that he had nothing to do with Russia, where he had longsought to do business. On NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Giuliani said talks may have gone on “as far as October, November” 2016. That matches his statement last month that Trump’s written answers to Mueller’s questions “covered up to November 2016.”

Like many people who spend too much time on Twitter, I watched with indignation Saturday morning as stories began appearing about a confrontation near the Lincoln Memorial between students from Covington Catholic High School and American Indians from the Indigenous Peoples March. The story felt personal to me; I live a few miles from the high school, and my son attends a nearby all-boys Catholic high school. I texted him right away, ready with a lesson on what the students had done wrong.

“They were menacing a man much older than them,” I told him, “and chanting ‘Build the wall!’ And this smirking kid blocked his path and wouldn’t let him leave.” The short video, the subject of at least two-thirds of my Twitter feed on Saturday, made me cringe, and the smirking kid in particular got to me: His smugness, radiating from under that red MAGA hat, was everything I wanted my teenagers not to be.

Mort Felix liked to say that his name, when read as two Latin words, meant “happy death.” When he was sick with the flu, he used to jokingly remind his wife, Susan, that he wanted Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” played at his deathbed. But when his life’s end arrived at the age of 77, he lay in his study in his Berkeley, California, home, his body besieged by cancer and his consciousness cradled in morphine, uninterested in music and refusing food as he dwindled away over three weeks in 2012. “Enough,” he told Susan. “Thank you, and I love you, and enough.” When she came downstairs the next morning, she found Felix dead.

During those three weeks, Felix had talked. He was a clinical psychologist who had also spent a lifetime writing poetry, and though his end-of-life speech often didn’t make sense, it seemed to draw from his attention to language. “There’s so much so in sorrow,” he said at one point. “Let me down from here,” he said at another. “I’ve lost my modality.” To the surprise of his family members, the lifelong atheist also began hallucinating angels and complaining about the crowded room—even though no one was there.

The death of Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t a galvanizing event, but the premature end of a movement that had only just begun.

“Woe to you, because you build tombs for the prophets, and it was your ancestors who killed them.” Jesus’s rebuke to the Pharisees descended upon me on a cold January morning in 2017, in West Potomac Park in Washington, D.C. On that Monday, the national holiday dedicated to the man at whose memorial I stood, the capital bustled in anticipation of a more pressing political event. That’s why I was at the park, pondering this granite stone of hope, carved out of a mountain of despair. The memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. cast its shadow over me, its presence just as conflicted as those tombs.

As sure as Jesus’s words proved prescient about the adoption of Christianity in the empire that killed him, so too the modern-day legend of King writes itself in real time. In the official story told to children, King’s assassination is the transformational tragedy in a victorious struggle to overcome.

President Donald Trump is trapped. He shut the government to impose his will on the incoming Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. That plan has miserably failed. Instead, Trump has found himself caught in the trap he supposed he had set for his opponents.

Now he is desperately seeking an exit.

Trump attempted Exit One on January 8.He spoke that evening to the nation from the Oval Office, hoping to mobilize public opinion behind him, pressing the Democratic leadership of the House to yield to him. That hope was miserably disappointed. Surveys post-speech found that Trump had swayed only 2 percent of TV viewers. In the 10 days since the speech, Trump’s approval ratings have dipped to about the lowest point in his presidency. The supposedly solid Trump base has measurably softened.

Starting the process will rein in a president who is undermining American ideals—and bring the debate about his fitness for office into Congress, where it belongs.

On January 20, 2017,Donald Trump stood on the steps of the Capitol, raised his right hand, and solemnly swore to faithfully execute the office of president of the United States and, to the best of his ability, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. He has not kept that promise.

Instead, he has mounted a concerted challenge to the separation of powers, to the rule of law, and to the civil liberties enshrined in our founding documents. He has purposefully inflamed America’s divisions. He has set himself against the American idea, the principle that all of us—of every race, gender, and creed—are created equal.

The civil-rights leader is now celebrated as a modern founding father, a celebration that gives those who oppose his policy agenda a claim to his legacy.

Every year, on the third Monday in January, people play their hand at the same game. “What would Martin Luther King Jr. think?” becomes an unwritten essay prompt for op-eds, a topic of speeches and sermons, a call to action, and a societal rebuke. In this annual pageant, there are few who would ever mark themselves as living in opposition to the legacy of King, even as they work to dismantle it.

It was only natural that Vice President Mike Pence would quote King in defense of President Donald Trump’s decision to continue the ongoing government shutdown until he receives full funding for a border wall. “One of my favorite quotes from Dr. King was: ‘Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy’,” Pence said on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, citing King’s famous 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. “You think of how he changed America. He inspired us to change through the legislative process, to become a more perfect union. That’s exactly what President Trump is calling on Congress to do: Come to the table in the spirit of good faith.”

“We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom.”

In April 1963, King was jailed in Birmingham, Alabama, after he defied a state court’s injunction and led a march of black protesters without a permit, urging an Easter boycott of white-owned stores. A statement published in The Birmingham News, written by eight moderate white clergymen, criticized the march and other demonstrations.

This prompted King to write a lengthy response, begun in the margins of the newspaper. He smuggled it out with the help of his lawyer, and the nearly 7,000 words were transcribed. The eloquent call for “constructive, nonviolent tension” to force an end to unjust laws became a landmark document of the civil-rights movement. The letter was printed in part or in full by several publications, including the New York Post, Liberation magazine, The New Leader, and The Christian Century. The Atlantic published it in the August 1963 issue.

She beat George W. Bush on Social Security privatization, and she’ll beat Trump on the wall.

Democrats sometimes portray themselves as high-minded and naive—unwilling to play as rough as the GOP. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is, once again, proving that self-image wrong. She’s not only refusing Donald Trump’s demand for a border wall. She’s trying to cripple his presidency. And she may well succeed.

Pelosi’s strategy resembles the one she employed to debilitate another Republican president: George W. Bush. Bush returned to Washington after his 2004 reelection victory determined to partially privatize Social Security. “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital,” he told the press, “and I intend to spend it.” Bush’s plan contained two main elements. The first was convincing the public that there was a crisis. Social Security, he declared in his 2005 State of the Union address, “is headed toward bankruptcy.” The second was persuading Democrats to offer their own proposals for changing it.

[Please see Updates at the end of this post.] I don’t know who the young man in the MAGA hat in this photo is. And I don’t care to know.

His name, which the internet will inevitably turn up, really doesn’t matter. It matters to his parents, of course—and to his teachers. I hope they will be reflective, and I know they should be ashamed: of this smirking young man and the scores of other (nearly all white) students from a Catholic school in Kentucky. Today, on the National Mall in Washington, they apparently mocked, harassed, and menaced a Native American man who had fought for the United States in Vietnam and who today represented both the U.S. and his Omaha nation with poise, courage, and dignity.

Rudy Giuliani, on the Sunday shows, says the president never told Michael Cohen to lie about pursuing Trump Tower Moscow during the 2016 campaign.

Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who’s representing President Donald Trump for free, is keeping up his public-relations war on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. In a pair of appearances on Sunday-morning talk shows, he stuck to the playbook: Attack Mueller’s credibility, and insist that all of Trump’s statements and actions were legal. Giuliani admits a fair amount but always insists that no crime was committed.

The president’s attorney once again said that discussions about a Trump Tower Moscow project may have continued as late as November 2016, contrary to the president’s previous statements that he had nothing to do with Russia, where he had longsought to do business. On NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Giuliani said talks may have gone on “as far as October, November” 2016. That matches his statement last month that Trump’s written answers to Mueller’s questions “covered up to November 2016.”